Now In November, a reconsideration

 

I just finished reading Now in November, the winner of the 1935 Pulitzer Prize written by Josephine W. Johnson.  It seems to be in the vein of Thomas Hardy’s heavier novels, Jude the Obscure, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, the Mayor of Casterbridge.  But Hardy was much more heavy-handed than Johnson seems to be.  She was a young girl writing about young girls to a large extent.

Also Johnson seems to have inherited some of the motivation that drove the Muckrakers.  The most egregious offenses they addressed have been corrected.  The farms of Josephine Johnson’s day are not utterly immune to the hazards the farmers of Now In November endured, or rather succumbed to – most of them, but it is possible to have a successful farm nowadays; I had a friend, Bill Cave who went in with someone else on the development of a vineyard.  But like most of these successful small farms, there is an outside income available.  Most of these small farmers are not relying solely upon the income from their farms. Nevertheless, in their day, Marget, Merle and Kettrin grew up on their farm and had no wish to leave it.  Even though their mother and father and Kettrin are dead by the end of the novel, Marget and Merle intend to continue working their family farm.  

In the days prior to Johnson’s novel, the understanding of life outside the family farm increased.  Some of this enlarged understanding was due to World War One.  There was a popular song in those days: “How you going to keep them down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree?”  Exposure to life outside the family farm opened up other possibilities.  

Also, in order to keep a family farm viable, the eldest son, assuming he was reasonably competent usually inherited the family farm.  The other possible heirs did something else.  My grandfather Troy Matthews (my mother’s father) was not the eldest son.  His brother inherited the farm.  I met Troy in the 1940's shortly before he died of tuberculosis.  He was known for being clever and earned money in different ways, included the development of photographs.  I inherited his lightroom equipment.

Victor Davis Hanson is very concerned about protecting farming interests in the California Central Valley.  Since Hanson is a successful professor and has published several popular books, maybe he doesn’t need any of his family-farm income, but I read some biographical information about him several years ago and he was at the time enmeshed in that milieu.  

Thus, in one sense Now in November is dealing with dated issues. The small farmer makes up 87% of the farming industry but produces only 17% of the value.  Apparently most small farmers have an additional source of income and are doing it for the life style rather than a desire to become wealthy.  And that seems to be the intention of the girls’ father.

The more popular Jude the Obscure and Tess of the D’Urbervilles are also dealing with dated issues.  I didn’t read these as part of any class but simply to find out how good they really were.  I wouldn’t put Now in November in their class, but they share a history.  Social offenses described in these three novels have been largely dealt with.  When they still exist, they don’t exist at the level dealt with in these novels. . . IMHO.

On the seeking of literary immortality

 David Pryce Jones in an article on Evelyn Waugh wrote, "About the best that most writers can expect from posterity is cultural embalming, probably in the form of a monograph written by some academic paid to read books nobody else is reading."  The prospective writer might take note of this as he evaluates, as much as he can, his future.  We learn from history that the term "immortal" was applied to a number of writers and poets, but if we examine those writers and poets we in almost all cases observe that their immortality has expired. 

Is the work of any modern writer or poet likely to be less transient than the tunes the modern teen-ager listens to?  I was once enamored of Chinese poetry before China transitioned into Maoist Communism.   I read poems about old men boating down to picturesque meeting places where they would drink wine and read recently written poetry to each other, poetry that they had written. They pretty much all seemed to write poetry.  It was enough for them if their friends liked it.  There was no thought of achieving immortality as poets.  They wrote for the joy of it and listened to each other read it in the same fashion. 

I wonder if in modern day China the poets I read (in translation) are still being read today -- perhaps only by "academics paid to read books nobody else is reading."

So if today a young person discovers he or she has writing ability, there is a great market in fiction of various genres, but perhaps, the the number of people who make a financial success of this approach isn't high.  There are several other fields that seek good writers.  In my own case, I was hired by the Chief Engineer of the Skybolt program back in 1959.  The Air Force complained that Douglas engineers couldn't write well enough to be readily understood by Air Force personnel.  I had a wife by this time who regularly spent more than I made, and since the realm of workers (not managers) at Douglas Aircraft was a meritocracy, I learned a variety of other skills and thus managed to work there as Douglas merged with McDonnell Douglas which was eventually bought out by Boeing. 

Now at age 90 I can sit in my second-story study and look out my window through the trees at mountains that were within walking distance when I retired here 25 years ago.  Now because of a damaged knee I wouldn't try to walk that far.  In any case I don't wish to.  I do still write a lot.  I keep journals, write a lot of letters, and a few articles and poems I might post on a simple blog that was set up for me by a nephew many years ago.  The stats tell me that 1,783,486 have looked at various of the articles and poetry since it was first set up. It's been convenient.  For example, I had always planned to study the American Civil War and so several years ago, did that.  I ordered probably most of the authoritative literature on that war from eBay and Amazon and joined forums discussing various matters, strategies, battles, theories about the merits of various generals, etc.  Tempers can run high on these subjects.   For many, I found, these Civil War discussions were overriding.  I was invited to stick with it and make everlasting friends with those I agreed with, but after I had enough, had written enough articles, I stopped, gave most of my Civil War books to my brother-in-law and went on to other subjects.

Another reason it does not seem wise to seek literary immortality is that our language is rapidly changing, and has been for a great many years.  No one will understand what we write in a thousand years.  Anthropologists and geneticists estimate that our species has existed for about 200,000 years.  We have had written languages of any sophistication for less than 12,000 years. 

One of our "immortal" authors, Geoffrey Chaucer lived from 1342 to 1400.  His famous work is the Canterbury Tales.  I've read them several times and took an upper division (elective) course in Chaucer where we were given to read him in the original to get the rhythm of his poetry correctly, but we weren't required to read him in the original for understanding.  And, unless one becomes a scholar and specializes in Chaucer and Middle English literature, one isn't going to be able to read this literature in the original with any degree of confidence.  Was Chaucer concerned about his "immortality?"  It has been only 625 years since Chaucer died and no one today is reading him in the original except for academics paid to read authors no one else is reading.  Even if we count translations, I wonder how many read Chaucer in translation today.  

On the rewriting of Huckleberry Finn

 

Having been raised in the Los Angeles harbor and further educated in the Marine Corps, I grappled with several majors in college and perhaps mostly because of my grandmother ended up majoring in English.  She herself had gone deaf for a while as a girl but made up for her lack of education by reading.  She became an evangelist for reading and for one of my birthdays or perhaps Christmas she gave me the complete works of Mark Twain.  That set wouldn't be considered complete today, but I read the whole thing, parts of it more than once.  However, when the question arose, as it often did back then, about a major American novelist whose work could match the likes of Thomas Hardy, Henry James (who at heart was more British than American), or Joseph Conrad who was perhaps as much Polish in his writings as British.  But regardless of however much British James and Conrad were, they along with Hardy were the novelists I admired back then and didn't think the U.S. had produced anyone comparable, certainly not Mark Twain; although I read him with great attention -- but not in a long time.

I was surprised, and a bit appalled, that so few seem to have difficulty with what Percival Everett has done in his James.   I am prejudiced against the rewriting works of the past.   If this were done with a modern work, I suspect the previous writer or his estate would be suing the rewriter. 

Pretty much any classic can be rewritten to make it more politically and scientifically correct, but historians would urge such writers to leave the non-politically correct writings alone. You may not like Hitler's Mein Kampf, but it just isn't something someone interested in truth and accuracy would want to see rewritten. Someone might conclude that the revised version makes them happier and less offended, but historians will be offended unless they are interested in papers at some point that discuss the extremes writers who take up political causes are willing to go.

Back in the day when I thought I would continue on with my education, I thought I might examine the muckrakers. I read quite a few of them, even got a letter from someone related to the IWW, International Workers of the World. The left wing of today has no interest in rewriting the writings of Big Bill Haywood who spent his last days in Moscow, nor, in my opinion, should they.

Trust

 I read Trust, the co-winner of the 2023 Pulitzer-prize for fiction.  I haven't read the other winner, Demon Copperhead, but can't imagine it's as good as Trust.  In all my recent reading of prize-winning novels, I've read none better than Trust.

But on the downside, it would help a reader if he knew something of economics and the stock market.  I know more about the former than the latter.  Years ago, a long-shoreman who was greatly impressed by a fellow long-shoreman who was a well-versed in communism, would urge various books upon me.  I read them all and didn't then have a good answer to Marx, but I spent time in the company library at Douglas Aircraft and discovered John Maynard Keynes, after which I discounted anything this longshoreman, or his friend had to say on the subject; however, I wasn't all that interested in economics and haven't spent any time with it until Trust.  How much trouble someone would have with no background in economics at all, I don't know, but I suspect some.   As to the stock market, perhaps most of us know a bit more about that.  And maybe the novel is self-explanatory enough, and I am exaggerating its difficulty.

But even if one knows quite a lot about economics and the stock market, Diaz, takes us beyond with the capability to get into a zone and know what is going to happen (without having facts in mind) before it happens.  Still having the concept of interactive reading, I recall being in a lunch-time hearts card game at McDonnell Douglas.  My partner was an electronics engineer named Bob Servis who counted cards.  I did not count cards, but at critical points when I needed to do the right thing and paused, not exactly thinking it over but feeling (or something) my way, I soon felt what was probably right and it invariably was.  Bob Servis would smile with satisfaction, but it was during this time that I met Susan on the McDonnell Douglas bus and subsequently gave up card playing.  Bob Servis never forgave me.

To account for my success, I did pay close attention to everything being played, so maybe I subconsciously counted cards, but then maybe the heavy hitters at stock market trading do something like that, but certain people, perhaps only one person in Diaz's novel goes way beyond that.  By the time I learned who this was and what had happened, I was entirely impressed.  The only reason I won't say "happy" is that the ending was a bit sad. And yet the most important person in the novel, dying unrecognized, died happy, mostly, or so it would seem. 

Creation Lake, second reading

 

Feeling I hadn't done Rachel Kushner justice in my sketchy review of Creation Lake, I read her The Flamethrowers, and then her Mars Room.   And then I read Creation Lake a second time.  In between, I read some other reviews of Creation Lake and they weren't so far off from my reaction after reading it the first time.  And yet the people running the Booker Prize had some very laudatory things to say about it in justification for moving from their long list to the short one, things I didn't see after reading number one.   But with of her previous novels under my belt, I became accustomed to her style and was better able to appreciate Creation Lake.  It seemed to me then that the reviews on Youtube critical of the novel were made by reviewers, as I was in my previous review, who were reading Kushner for the first time and being thrown off by her strangeness.  But she grows on you.  She did on me. 

My assumption that some of Sadies assignments were hits may not be right.  Kushner is somewhat vague about what she is asked to do on her assignments.   She is asked to kill Paton and says she doesn't do hits, but she has her price and the ones employing her accept it.  She doesn't actually have to kill the target.  The target climbs up on some logs to get away from a young foolhardy motorcyclist.  The logs collapse, that the target is killed.  We hear the song Get Lucky in the background on one occasion and coincidence is mentioned in another; so maybe Kushner doesn't want Sadie to be an ordinary hit-woman, but she takes the assignment this time and seemingly retires at the end of the novel.  She isn't completely home free.  People are looking for her in regard to a civil suit associated with one of her earlier jobs, one that went awry.  But the statute of limitations has run out on the event so she won't be threatened with jail.  She will, however lose a lot of money if she loses that suit; so she spends a lot of time looking over her shoulder.   She quit smoking and drinking.  She wants to stay retired.  It seems like she'll be able to, but she's living away from people, living by herself, never able to have children, maybe never able to live with anyone, filled with so many things she can't talk about, not able to be herself in a future relationship.  She's in her thirties and counting.

One of the Youtube reviewers said she was "evil, evil, evil."  I didn't see that.   She sets her morals aside when she takes on a job, but she doesn't want to keep on doing that, and she hopes, by the end of the novel, that she won't have to do it again.   When you give up drinking, you can no longer make excuses for the things you do that you don't like.  You need to learn to live with yourself, if you can manage it.  Seems like Kushner is telling us that Sadie can.

Is The Vegetarian also a political treatise?

 In my lazy visiting of the currently-being-published and receiving such prizes as the Booker and Nobel Prize for literature, and making my own judgment about their merits, I am presently in Han Kang, reading her Human Acts.  After the Korean War, South Korea endured some dictators and the military's subduing of a protest in 1980.   A political treatise, can't at the same time be a good novel, or so I was taught years ago, but Kang is hammering the dictator and the soldiers he ordered to shoot unarmed protestors.  The government at the time said about 20 or 30 were killed, but I read elsewhere that the true number might be closer to 2,000; so this is a part of South Korea’s history that nearly every Korean is going to have an opinion about and those in leadership in 1980 are probably being excoriated in the same manner that French leaders under Phillipe Petain have been. 

But, does the Nobel Prize committee need to worry about whether a novel is political?   I wonder if they don't use the opposite criterion.  Consider The Vegetarian, the novel that won Han Kang the Booker prize.  I understand it has been applauded by feminists.  This has been denied by the reviewers I read, but after reading the novel, that is what I saw as well.  It doesn't take much to rake the flowers aside and look at the brutal treatment of the poor protagonist who has taken a firm stance.  She took a recognizable if not popular vegetarian stance, but in response to the cultural coercion she received, she took a position that clouded by poetry though it may be is a feminist stance.   After being held down and force-fed meat which she threw up, she resolved to take a further step and eat nothing at all.  Was she crazy?  No, she asks her sister whose charges are keeping her in the mental institution to let her go home.  The sister refuses.  Not just because she slept with the sister's husband, but because she refuses the wishes of their father and culture by not eating meat.  She becomes a feminist martyr by starving to death.

If the feminists and I are right about the nature of this novel rather than those who admire the beautiful poetic language, which those of us who don’t read Korean can’t properly judge (even though the translator of The Vegetarian won the Booker prize for translation), then the question remains, can a novel with a political agenda be a great novel? 

The Booker Prize was awarded to The Vegetarian, but the Nobel the other day seemed to be awarded to Kang's whole body of work.  I have read only two and a half novels, but these are her major novels if I can believe what has been written about her.  

The Vegetarian, a Phantasm on Passive Resistance

 

The main character, Yeong-hye, a hitherto ordinary Korean wife has a dream, after which she decides to become a vegetarian.  Her family and friends aren't interested in her opinion, her dream.  They want her to conform to their opinions, the common ideas of her Korean culture, but she resists, quits wearing a bra as well.  Her father hits her, and her husband leaves her, but she doesn't submit.

Yeong-hye's brother-in-law, her sister's husband, a photographic artist of sorts, finds the relatively isolated Yeong-hye the perfect object (victim) for an off-beat, semi-pornographic video he wants to make.  He approaches, slowly seduces, Yeong-hye into cooperating with his project which involves painting her naked body with flowers.  She is rather haphazardly returning to nature in her thinking and so goes along with his plan.  After fully painting her, he wants to make love to her.  But she objects because he doesn't have any flowers painted on himself.   So, he rushes off and gets an old girlfriend to paint flowers on him, rushes back, gets Yeong-hye to make love with him, while he records the whole thing.  He and Yeong-hye fall asleep on the floor of his studio.  When they wake up, the artists wife, Yeong-hye's sister is there.  She tells them that they are both obviously insane and that she is having them committed to a mental institution.  The authorities arrive and take them away.

Yeong-hye at the mental institution moves beyond vegetarianism and quits eating anything as well.   Her sister, In-hye, admits to herself that she had her sister committed in order to punish her, but she won't admit that and renounce the decision that got Yeong-hye committed.  She lets the authorities at the mental institution try their best to get Yeong-hye to eat, but Yeong-hye's strength and resolve is too much for them.  In a protracted, ugly battle, witnessed by her sister, Yeong-hye succeeds in starving herself to death.

I won't promise that what I have written here is what Han Kang had in mind.  When I think about what that might be, I recall the softening and poetical beauty of Yeong-hye's resistance and refuse to give up my theory -- not that I'd be willing to starve myself to death in support of it.

On reading Han Kang

 

I woke this morning in the midst of a dream about Korea.  I spent a year there years ago straight out of High School, back when a war was going on and South Korea wasn't at all as sophisticated as it is in Kang's day.  I got half way through Greek Lessons before falling asleep.  I knew soft-spoken Koreans like the two main characters, but Kang doesn't imply this is a current national characteristics and provides an adequate number of nasty personalities to contrast with the main ones.

The woman is abandoned and divorced after which her husband obtains custody of their young son.  The woman loses her ability to speak and so has no hope of being able to regain her son.  She had an episode of this as a young girl.  Hopefully she'll eventually regain her ability to speak, but it doesn't happen during the novel, at least no more than a promising squeak at the end.

Ultimately worse is the teacher of Greek.  He has a genetic condition causing him to slowly lose his eye-sight.  He is mostly blind during the early part of the novel, but Greek is something he can teach from memory; so neither his students nor school administrators know.

The two characters progress mostly separately until the woman tries to rescue a small bird in the mostly empty school building. The professor tries to see what she has cornered, stumbles, breaks his glasses and is rendered helpless.  The woman can't speak but she can write a word in the palm of his hand and manages to get him back to his apartment.  She sits with him as he talks. Eventually she leaves but comes back the next day.  He senses she is again there with him.  She intends to take him to get new glasses.  Emotions run high, and these work in her such that by the end of the novel we know her ability to speak will return. The woman and the Greek teacher are obviously together now, and if she can once again speak, we assume, they will be able to function adequately in the future.

My dry narrative doesn't do justice to the poetry of this short novel.  I should read it again, but not right now.  I don't want to tire my eyes because my son will arrive later to take me to Lens Crafter to be fitted for new glasses -- something scheduled long before Kang won the Novel Prize.

And with only my dog Jessica to speak to on most days, my ability to speak has deteriorated, but only to the extent that I typically sound foolish when I do speak.

In retrospect, I doubt that anyone familiar with Kang's published work would recommend Greek Lessons as a good place to start.  The Vegetarian, which won the Booker Prize is apparently more reasonable, but readers of this novel, report being reminded of Kafka's writings.  I read a lot of Kafka years ago and resolved never to reread him.  Nevertheless, with some reluctance, I just now downloaded the Kindle edition of The Vegetarian.

Review of Creation Lake

Picture a very successful “Hit Woman."  And she is willing to take on other nefarious tasks that don't quite seem like hits.  The government, the American government, hires her to take on the most challenging of hits. 

The author Rachel Kushner does us no favors as she shows this youngish woman in her fits and starts accomplishing her work.  It seemed to me most of the time that Sadie (not her real name) was in over her head.   She also has an ailment where she sort-of passes out that you’d think would cause a hit woman to take up a different line of work, but we learn sort of after the fact that she usually succeeds.  On one occasion when she doesn’t, she was fired, but we learn along the way that only means she no longer works directly for the government answering to a boss, but subsequently, agencies in the government feel free to give her ad hoc assignments.  

So what’s all this business about Bruno, Neanderthals and very dark caves?  Bruno is a sort of philosopher who impresses Sadie, but in a passing way.  Sadie looks for him as she’s bailing out of her most recent “hit” (in quotes because the target, Paton, is killed in an accident.  Sadie’s employers pay her without question because they don’t always know how she does it).

There is a lot of very well-written, interesting but as far as I can tell after a single reading, material irrelevant to what is presumably the main narrative, not all of it even true.  For example, someone argues convincingly that the Neanderthals discovered tobacco and Sadie, believes it.  She speculates that she probably has a large amount of Neanderthal DNA accounting for her inability to quit smoking.

Someone could advance the observation that Kushner’s well-written, interesting but irrelevant (to the purported main narrative) information is more interesting than Sadie’s narrative.

I’m no doubt being unfair inasmuch as I read most of the novel underestimating Sadie.  Perhaps I would appreciate the novel more upon a second reading.

I was very impressed with Rachel Kushner’s writing style and erudite cleverness. 

The Werewolf Principle

  After reading Clifford D. Simak’s Way Station, the logical next novel to read was The City, but it is about, so I’ve read, the aftermath of World War Two – or written in the aftermath of World War Two.  I decided instead to read The Werewolf Principle, and am at present 61% through it:

Mankind is at a point in the future where it has the means to colonize planets in our galaxy.  It is not to be done as independent investments, as I have surmised, but as world-government enterprises.  The predominate view is that the new planets be terra-formed, which is something I have assumed.  But another group thought it cheaper to change our settlers rather than the planets: change them into beings that could live in the existing environment of a given planet.  Studies in biodiversity had progressed to a point where such a thing was possible.

But it turns out that this was actually accomplished 200 years prior to the events in the novel.  Two androids were loaded with human brains from storage and modified in such a way that they were the equivalent of humans on non-human-friendly planet.  After the androids had been there for a while and had accumulated sufficient data, they returned to the spaceship, dumped their data and were restored to the condition of having just a human brain.  However, it turned out that the alien-nature acquired on the planet could not be utterly erased.  Thus, apparently (from as far as I have read), the androids, at least one of them, Blake, was “frozen” and stored in a capsule, while the main ship or ships traveled on for further investigations, experiments and adventures.

In the novel Blake is unfrozen and seems a normal human to the doctors checking him out, but he starts having blackouts, and there are reports of people seeing a wolf.  Blake is slowly reacquainting himself with who he really is, three personalities.  Blake, the Changer, Quester who became a wolf-like creature from a planet under investigation, and Thinker who is something like a biological computer with human quality understanding (not fully explained by Simak in my view).  The three elements can change from one to the other if they mutually agree which they always do. Things get out of hand when Quester as a sort-of wolf is threatened and fights his way through mobs of people killing many.  And so as one might expect, the humans chase after it, when it is in the wolf-like form, with the twenty-fourth century, or whenever, equivalent of pitchforks.  Good doctors will be trying to save Blake, but at this point that is not assured.  Elaine, the daughter of the Senator who opposed the biodiversity approach to inhabiting new planets, helps Blake escape.

In my currently befuddled state, I rather Identified with Blake.  I haven’t exactly turned into a Wolf but disgusted with the medical decisions and advice I’ve been receiving I undertook a strenuous workout program, day after day, so much work that everything ached, but inasmuch (I learned) as aspirin conflicts with the blood pressure medication (losartan) which is scheduled to be prescribed whenever I have my first meeting with my new doctor, I didn’t take any aspirin or any other pain medication.  I just ached, day after day.  But inasmuch as I have (tomorrow) an appointment with an optometrist in order to get new glasses (although he may try to send me to a specialist) I stopped my exercising two days prior to the appointment – in order to be able to think and speak coherently. 

The wolf is full of explosive energy which I have been, but he doesn’t think too clearly and needs Quester and Blake to figure things out.  That’s the way I have been.  I’ve just today begun thinking clearly.  Quester can enable Changer to change into any sort of creature.  There are little dwarf-like creatures (who came to visit earth from another planet, liked it here and decided to stay – living peacefully here and there in our forests).  I’m expecting Changer to be changed into one of those, but Blake no doubt would not like to remain one of these dwarfs – he’s a bit in love with the Senator’s daughter.

In Philip K Dick’s Do Androids dream of electric sheep, the beautiful android woman is raised not knowing she’s an android, much as Blake doesn’t know he is one.  Humans being in love with androids, and vice versa has been explored in the past.  Clifford D. Simak published The Werewolf Principle in 1967.  Philip K. Dick published his book a year later.  

In the meantime, I am working to determine my best configuration and have sought the pain of workouts in order to escape the hounding medical professionals and their pitchforks.  Looking back over my shoulder I have been at it intensely much as Quester and Changer worked together, but with the diminishment of this work preparatory to the optometrist and on the following day, the dentist, I shall attempt an appropriate disguise and hope to get back to my exercising as soon as possible.  There is still my first meeting with my new primary physician to arrange and another meeting with my oral surgeon, which I shall try to delay, but there are so many – their pitchforks are so very sharp, and Quester cannot figure out a path to something that can escape them, something that doesn’t have a crippled leg.

Villages of Dreams

 Some time ago I bought the paperback edition of Republic of Dreams – Greenwich Village: The American Bohemia, 1910-1960, by Ross Wetzsteon, copyright 2002.  I liked its encyclopedic nature and eventually bought a hard copy, but several times in venturing a few more pages, I give it up.  In the realm of dogs, each one enthusiastically begins life pretty much like all its ancestors, learning pretty much the same things anew.  It is true they can be trained, like the Belgian Malinois I’ve been watching in the Seal Team series, but this learning can’t be (as far as I know) passed on to the Malinois’ descendants.  Humans are a bit like that, but they think they (some of them) are creating something immortal.  But we notice that subsequent generations reject what the previous ones produced.  They in turn value something they consider “more advanced.”

The Bohemians of whom Wetzsteon writes can be excused for their overweening pride because they had no understanding of our (homo Sapien’s) history.  Maybe we have “progressed” into the species we have become especially during the last 200,000 or 300,000 years.  Then perhaps in the last 15,000 we have become something new, something clearly relatable to the abandonment of our hunter-gatherer past and the living in villages.  Perhaps we already had the ability to advance that the leisure of village life enabled.   In any case, 15,000 years is a very short time for our village-dwelling species to have advanced to a point where it can declare: this art is good, and this is not – except in very temporary terms.  They should more precisely say “this seems good and that seems not good to us here and now.”  That would leave open to the next generation to declare something different good and not good.  And given a few more generations, perhaps they would have the perspective to understand how temporary their judgements were.

We have no difficulty accepting advancements in technology, for example the technology associated with fighting wars.  What I am seeing portrayed in Seal Team is far beyond anything we had when I was in the Marines in the early 1950s, but a modern warrior would be unlikely to look down upon the warriors of, say, our Civil War.  Courage and resourcefulness are appreciated even while we recognize the limitations imposed upon them by not having the more technologically advanced equipment that we have today.  That same sort of understanding has not been developed by artists who fancy that their art is more advanced (superior) to what was considered good art in previous generations.  And by “art” I have in mind literature – both novels and poetry.  

When we think of sculpture, we can hark back to Greek achievements in stone and admire the results.  Changes have occurred; whether modern results are “more advanced” than achievements by the Greeks I’ll leave for others to debate.  In music, what we call “classical” or orchestral is still appreciated, in all available periods, by afficionados.  In regard to “songs,” perhaps judgements that apply to literature or poetry might apply to songs as well.  Famous old songs are appreciated by older people more than younger, it would seem.   Songs and the way they are sung change from generation to generation.  Young people who value the “latest” songs merely frown upon songs valued by their parents without claiming “their” songs to be more advanced . . . at least it seems that way to me.  They simply “like” the new songs better than the old, and about comparisons in terms of “likes” there can be no argument.

Frenchmen and Indians

 

Le Tellier's The Anomaly, winner of the Goncourt prize depicts the poor decision of an American president as being responsible for the destruction of all mankind.  I was disappointed in the novel, but others, perhaps sharing that French prejudice, loved it.

I turned next to the novel that won the Pulitzer prize for 2021, The Night Watchman.  I am only 20% through it, but the characters I've encountered thus far are mostly dirt-poor American Indians from North Dakota.  Thus, this too, if it continues on in the same vein, has a political element.  Liberal democracies intend that everyone is entitled to accomplish and earn however much he is capable of accomplishing and earning.  It made no initial provision for helping those who for whatever reason weren't as capable of competing in this sort of environment. 

As we all know, elements of Socialism have been incorporated into all Liberal Democracies over time.  Whereas in the past, in the West, the Christian church took care of the poor.  Marx proposed to do it better, and Liberal Democracies have followed his lead to varying degrees of success. 

I'll pause here to say that I don't know anything about the state of American Indians in North Dakota, but I have had considerable experience with Indians in the Marine Corps.  Also, according to my mother, my siblings and I are 1/8 or 1/16 Indian.  That belief turned out not to be correct as I found out when I had my DNA checked by Ancestry.com a few years ago.  There are no Indians in our ancestry, but when I got to the Marine Corps base in Korea, I was approached by a large Indian from Oklahoma who "could tell" I was part Indian and inasmuch as he was full-blooded, he was chief Indian at the base, and I must follow his orders which were to show up at the slop-chute every evening I wasn't on duty and drink beer with all the other Indians.  My best friend during that period was Bill Salois who was 1/4 Blackfoot.  Bill wanted me to join him in Montana after our enlistments were up so that we could build up our own cattle ranch.  When I pointed out that neither of us had enough money for that, he told me not to worry.  We could earn money in rodeos.  I objected that I had never competed in a rodeo.  He told me not to worry.  It was easy. 

In addition to that "Indian" experience, I retired a short distance from the Soboba Indian reservation.   The Soboba Casino has become a great success, and every member of the Soboba tribe now receives a cut; so presumably no Soboba Indian is dirt poor at present. 

Thus, my own personal experiences haven't exposed me to any Indians that are as poor as Louise Erdrich portrays in her novel.  Erdrich is part Indian, about as much as I thought I was, and her grandfather or great grandfather fought against Custer and was later punished for it.  But those who are full-blooded and not a member of a tribe that has a casino, may well be as dirt poor as the North Dakota tribe Erdrich writes about.  I'll take her word for it.  We here in the United States are not so thoroughly socialistic that we raise the standard of living for every poor person to the extent we would agree he is no longer "poor," but we're working on it.

In the meantime, this non-poor, non-Indian who was educated in the ways of literature is leaning toward finding fault with organizations who award prizes based on their political prejudices rather than novels that comprise the best literature.

But, apologies to Louise Erdrich if I later discover that she has created a work of great literature.

Le Tellier's The Anomaly

 

I didn't like The Anomaly as well as the reviewers I read afterwards and none of them addressed the implications I saw, but perhaps I'm wrong.

When an Air France flight encounters a "storm of the century" storm, the Boeing 787 survives and the pilot asks for landing instructions.  The people on the ground are amazed in that this very flight arrived 106 days previously.  The U.S. government assembles all the experts who interview the duplicate 240 or so passengers and crew.  Much of the novel then deals with a few key characters, the ones who landed in March.  The duplicates land 106 days later in June.   The characters are somewhat interesting and were they developed further they would have been more-so, but that would have detracted from the plot.

One of the key theories about what is going on (provided by American scientists and mathematicians) is that a superior intelligence is testing various scenarios on a number of different worlds.  Thus, if this theory is correct, then the earth is being tested when the Boeing 787 from a duplicate world is allowed to leak into our world and land with a duplicate set of human beings. 

However, the American experts do surprisingly well sorting things out, getting the duplicates to meet their counterparts -- mildly heart-warming except for the hitman from the June landing who murders his March counterpart.

The novel is funny in a lot of places, but much as, perhaps, Dr. Strangelove was funny.  The American President, obviouslyTrump (Le Tellier apparently thought he would win the last election) is too stupid to understand any more than the rudiments of what is going on.  Thus, at the end of the novel when a third Air France duplicate breaks through a storm and asks for landing instructions, Trump has it shot down. 

And the last page is filled with gibberish which I take to mean our world is breaking apart.  We have failed the test. 

Earlier we learn that the Chinese have also received a duplicate set of passengers and crew from a flight landing there, but they merely kept it secret.   The U.S., where the public has a right to know, didn't have the option of keeping anything secret; so as the president says something like, "we can't keep having these duplicate airplanes landing on our air fields." 

And implied by all of this is that the autocratic Chinese are managing the situation better than the democratic U.S.  Also implied is that the U.S. ought not to allow someone like Trump to become president and have the power to respond stupidly to a superior species. 

And so, if my interpretation is correct, and it probably isn't since none of the reviews I read agree with it, this is a well-written novel with a weak plot handled inadequately.  Had I read this in the Marine Corps when several of us were reading collections of SF short stories, I would have had a great laugh over it, but I wouldn't have thought it any better than many of the other stories I read. 

I recall one short story where a genius inventor who did his best work while drunk woke up one morning to discover that he'd created a robot, but he couldn't recall why, and this robot defied him and wouldn't do anything he said.  Finally at the end of the story, the inventor finally figures it out.  "Robot," he orders. "Bring me a beer!"  "Yes sir," the robot replies and scurries off to get him one.

Mann's Reflections of a Non-Political Man

 

Starting with the book review at https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/reflections-of-a-nonpolitical-man-thomas-mann-die-fruhen-jahre-book-review-michael-lipkin/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=TLS%202021%2012%2016&utm_term=TLS  The occasion of this book review is the republication (this year) of Mann's Reflections of a Non-Political Man.  It has two additional essays by Mann and an introduction by Mark Lilla: Amazon has it at https://www.amazon.com/Reflections-Nonpolitical-Man-Thomas-Mann-ebook/dp/B08BK9Z4CW/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2HO613QCR6J8U&keywords=Reflections+of+a+Nonpolitical+Man&qid=1639694506&s=books&sprefix=reflections+of+a+nonpolitical+man+%2Cstripbooks%2C247&sr=1-1  

I received the book review on-line from TLS.  It was written by Michael Lipkin and entitled "A Non-Political Mann?" in which Mann is first castigated for being an active supporter of Germany in WWI.  I've been reading Margaret Macmillan's War: How Conflict Shaped Us.  Also, inasmuch as we, many of us, can't understand the forces that took the world into that war very clearly, I doubt I'd have a problem with Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, in which he asserts "Germany's rights to defend itself against the aggression of English and French 'civilization.'"

The review goes on to describe Mann as reestablishing himself as a "defender of the fledgling democracy" with his On the German Republic, followed by The Magic Mountain which won him the Nobel prize in 1929.  "Mann was abroad on the lecture circuit when Hitler rose to power in 1933.  "He wisely elected to stay there. . ." 

Lipkin goes on to write, "He famously spent his last active years in California, of all places, testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee as a suspected Communist."

I take the "of all places" to be referring to HUAC's presence.  Many European intellectuals leaned toward Communism after the war in order to emphasize their distance from fascism.  That was understandable in Europe -- not so much in the U.S.  HUAC didn't appreciate that in an American citizen; which Mann had become.  Also, Lipkin's reference to Mann's ". . . last active years in California" seems doubtful.  After experiencing HUAC and the frenetic anti-communism of the time, he let himself be hounded off to Switzerland in 1952 where a Jeffrey Meyers article describes him as being active: "In his last peaceful and greatly honored years, Mann published The Black Swan (1953) and Confessions of Felix Krull (1954). In addition to Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke, Stefan George, James Joyce, Robert Musil, Hermann Hesse, Erich Remarque, Ignazio Silone, Irwin Shaw, Jorge Luis Borges, Georges Simenon, Graham Greene, and Elias Canetti also lived and died there."  Mann died in Zurich in 1955.

The Jeffrey Meyers article can be seen here:  https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?cc=mqr;c=mqr;c=mqrarchive;idno=act2080.0051.419;g=mqrg;rgn=main;view=text;xc=1

Where among other things we learn "Mann, a great movie fan and friend of Charlie Chaplin, preferred the glamour of Hollywood to the dry academic life in Princeton. Most of the German exiles had settled in southern California and gathered in the stimulating salon of Greta Garbo’s screenwriter, Salka Viertel. Mann was then reunited with many old friends: the writers Franz Werfel, Bruno Frank, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Mann’s old political adversary Bertolt Brecht, as well as the film director William Dieterle and, for musical help with Doctor Faustus, Bruno Walter, Igor Stravinsky, and Arnold Schönberg. Mann, who didn’t feel entirely at ease in an English-speaking ambience, remained cocooned in the German colony. (It’s a pity that he never knew the most cultured and intellectual young Austrian directors, Billy Wilder and Fred Zinnemann.) Mann did not become close to any American writers but had some contact with three English émigrés: W. H. Auden and through him Christopher Isherwood (both were homosexual and spoke German) and Aldous Huxley. Mann praised Huxley’s novels and essays but roundly condemned the influential but pernicious drug-induced mysticism of The Doors of Perception (1954)."

Hardy compared to Homer as having written a “classic”

Hardy’s The Return of the Native is being advanced as a “classic.”  Most critics I’ve read consider it his best novel.  But how does he stack up against Homer?  Homer writes about heroes at the dawn of civilization.  His heroes deal with gods and goddesses and possess enormous courage and prowess. 

Hardy’s Clym Yeobright was born on Egdon Heath, a spread out primitive farming community.  He left it to become a successful diamond merchant in the city (Paris) and then returned to teach the village children of Egdon Heath.  The confused Eustacia Vye hates living on the heath and wants to move the city.  She hopes Clym will take her there.  Meanwhile Clym’s cousin Thomasin, content to live on the heath but in love with the flashy Wildeve hopes he will stay with her on the heath.  Wildeve however is in love with Eustacia, and is willing to take her to the city but she is by this time in love with Clym.  Clym studies night and day to become a teacher, and nearly blinds himself in the process.  Not being able to see well enough to study, he takes up a job as a furze-cuter.  Eustacia has married Clym hoping to convince him to take her away from Egdon Heath, but not only is he unwilling to leave.  Now he is unable to.  Confusion ensues, Eustacia agrees to run off with Wildeve but can’t go through with it and throws herself in Shadwater Weir.  Wildeve jumps in to save her and they both drown.  Clym settles back into the local community and becomes a lowly preacher.  Thomasin marries a local dairy farmer and is happy with him. He is very happy with her.  Clym has no one. 

It is only because of his publisher’s urging that Hardy allows Thomasin to end up happily married to Diggory Venn.  Hardy wanted her to end up a solitary widow.

Just as Homer wrote about heroes at the dawn of civilization, Hardy wrote about village life perhaps not a the literal dawn of large cities, but something like that.  Clym went off to the city but wished to return to his village.  Eustacia had heard about the city and wants to live there.  Thomasin is happy in her village.  This in effect, according to Hardy is a pitiful situation.  Hardy writes well, but he isn’t interested in warfare or heroes.  He is very much taken with pitiful people, Tess, Jude, the Mayor of Casterbridge.

So can anything of Hardy’s be considered a classic?  Surely not in a Homeric heroic sense, but his novels compare well with some of the tragedies of the citified Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus which were based upon Homeric themes.  The Greek playwrights however are constrained to write on Homeric themes.  Hardy on the other hand has no Homeric thoughts and sees only the pitiful effects of an unjust and uncaring civilization. 

Classics as War Literature

 

Unarguably, Homer, Virgil, Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus were the only classics for centuries.  In Western Europe, the Renaissance consisted of rediscovering these classics.  And key to these classics was the Trojan War.  The method for fighting that war changed little in succeeding centuries.  Even by Napoleon's time there was only a marginal difference.  His soldiers had bullets, but tactical attacks were made with bayonets.  In the midst of the American Civil War it was demonstrated that bayonet attacks against entrenched troops using rifles that could be reloaded quickly were destined to have unacceptable casualties.  Though this lesson should have been well understood by the First World War, it was not.  British, French and German soldiers were ordered to fix-bayonets and charge entrenched enemies equipped with machine guns.  Most had learned this lesson by World War Two, but the Japanese were famous for their banzai charges which were successful against poorly equipped Chinese, but suicide against the Marines who island-hopped using machine guns and rapid firing M1's.

Have there been "classics" written about warfare that is radically different from the way the Trojans and Achaeans fought?  What comes to mind?  All Quiet on the Western Front for example?   I see that as an antiwar novel whose author is pessimistic about WW1 tactics.  Improvements in communications let the people back home understand the nature of modern warfare and they were critical of it.  British and French populations were so traumatized by the devastating methods of their generals that they refused to adequately prepare for Hitler's initiation of WW II.  The U.S. had less excuse for being unprepared, but it had a history of isolationism as a result of being located between two oceans.  

One might see modern warfare in a great state of flux and think it impossible to write a classic that will be pertinent for succeeding generations.  How would such a thing be possible when warfare is sure to be different?  I read Nelson DeMille's extremely well-written Up Country.  His protagonist, Paul Brenner thirty years after the Vietnam War in which he was an an accomplished and decorated combat soldier, returns for an Odyssey Up Country.  Rather than a Homeric as-it-happens trek, Brenner recalls significant events as he travels.  Rather than Gods and Goddesses thwarting him, he has a Communist Colonel who dogs him throughout his entire journey.  Odysseus thwarts Penelope's suitors and restores himself on Ithaca.  Paul Brenner thwarts the Communist colonel as well as corrupt American officials in Vietnam and returns safely to America. 

DeMille has the current advantage of writing in a modern language understood by English-speaking people everywhere and potentially translated into any modern language.  Homer has been translated into modern languages, but ancient Greek is translated into modern languages with uneven results.  Scholars of ancient Greek are regularly expressing unhappiness with earlier translations and creating new ones.  So, is there any possibility of a DeMille’s Up Country being thought equal to The Odyssey?   No.  The Odyssey is incomparable.  Even if DeMille is easier to read and understand than Homer, Homer has the prestige. Homer is in a sense the definition of “classic.” 

Imagine a college literature class 500 years from now.  It will still be valuing Homer, but will it value DeMille?  What could they say about him?  He may have had Homer in mind when he wrote Up Country and so isn’t as original.  Also, he wrote about a forgotten war between the U.S. and Vietnam; whereas no generation forgets the Trojan War.  Also, DeMille’s soldiers fight in a fashion that was used for a short time, but Homer’s soldiers fought using a method present at the dawn of history and subsequently used for hundreds of subsequent years.

Will anything being written today be current 500 years from now, be, in other words a “classic” at that time?  I’m reluctant to say “no,” but at the moment I can’t bring anything to mind.

Miscellaneous thoughts on the "Classics"

Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are the earliest Classics.  The Iliad is about a war and the Odyssey is about a veteran of that war during the process of his returning home.  The war was fought with spears, swords and shields.  Virgil’s Aeneid is about another veteran of the Trojan war.  This veteran goes off to found a new nation. 

War in Homer’s and Virgil's days was fought from or against city-states and city-states we learn from archeology were a sociological advance over villages.  Going back further in time we find only hunter-gatherer tribe and those tribe members didn’t know how to write and left us no classics. 

The Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid were valued as epic poems.  Milton didn’t strive to create a classic, he strove to create an epic poem that would stand with the earlier three.  Others have striven to write epics.  Hart Crane’s Bridge is a recent example, but no attempt since Paradise Lost has been considered a success. 

The list of “classics” includes more then these epic poems.  A Classic might be a well-told story about a war, War and Peace, for example.  A Classic might also be a well-told story about an individual, Crime and Punishment for example.  It might also be a story of a great event, Moby Dick and Red Badge of Courage are examples.

A problem for good novelists, novelists seemingly capable of writing classics is that the circumstances of our societies changes rapidly.  I’m currently reading Nelson DeMille’s Wild Fire.  In it he has an ATTF (Anti-Terrorist Task Force) agent attempt to infiltrate a home-grown terrorist organization.  The agent is described as taking with him a very expensive 12 MP Nikon camera equipped with a 300 mm lens.  I suspect this is the Nikon D700 camera which was expensive in its day.  It is still an excellent camera, but most would consider it obsolete.  Wild Fire was published in November 2006.  The world of technology has changed dramatically since 2006.  Shall a novelist then play it safe and not mention technology?  Perhaps DeMille thought he was doing that by not mentioning the Nikon model, but his mentioning 12 megapixels gives it away.  Perhaps he thought 12 megapixels was going to be as good as it gets.  I thought that back then.  We were wrong. 

Also, from Wikipedia, “As of 2020, right-wing extremist terrorism accounted for the majority of terrorist attacks and plots in the US and has killed more people in the continental United States since the September 11 attacks than Islamic terrorism.  Thus, DeMille writing about a Right-Wing Terrorist organization attempting to trick the U.S. government into thinking it has been attacked by Islamic terrorists is a much-used plot.  But perhaps it was not over-used when DeMille wrote in 2006.  Nevertheless, while I am only 17% through Wild Fire I am not very excited about reading a novel with a plot that was subsequently over used.  On the other hand this prejudice isn't fair to a novelist who was the first to use this theme.  The Wild Fire American terrorists seem a bit like some of Ian Fleming's evil villains.    

Regarding "Classics" as "novels that matter"

 Without an elaboration I have yet to imagine, I can’t make that definition work, or, can’t make that elaboration work without having such novels preach; which would seem to disqualify a novel from being “great.”  Years ago in my left-wing days I read a lot of Communist-oriented novels.  Jack London wrote some – terrible stuff in my opinion, as were all the others.  I recall reading one by Clara Weatherwax called Marching, Marching.  In a 1936 review, Joseph Vanzier, aka John G. Wright, a Trotskyite, concluded “As for the novel itself, it is a travesty on literature and a libel against the working class. Its style is the dregs of the Joyce tradition, drained off through the worst of Wolfe and Faulkner, combined with school-essay “straightforward” writing. Its characters are wooden monstrosities, conceived with a kind of horrible masochistic delight in repulsive details and an infantile pleasure in trivial nobilities. The book is liberally interlarded with long speeches on war, strikes, trade unions, Fascism, apparently lifted from back copies of the Daily Worker.

“What is tragic is to realize that even in a book so bad as this there are materials, lost in the morass, for genuine and even great literature. Not the least in the charges of the indictment against Stalinism must be the stultification of intelligence and sensibility to which it condemns its adherents.” 
 
I’d be interested in learning what Vanzier thought “genuine and even great literature” would be.  Would giving it a Trotskyist emphasis satisfy him? 

Moving into the present I can imagine Nelson DeMille’s The General’s Daughter mattering to those who disapprove of discrimination against women in the same way that Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Ubervilles mattered to those who disapproved of the sexual mores of Victorian England, and before Tess was the Scarlet Letter which exemplified Hawthorne’s disapproval of the mores of early Massachusetts.  

As to whether The General’s Daughter might one day be included in someone’s list of Classics (It is only in Franklin’s collection of “Signed First Editions”), The Scarlet Letter is included in the Franklin Library’s 100 greatest books of all time, but Tess of the D’Urbervilles is not. 
Franklin also published the 50 volume Oxford Library of the World’s Greatest Books.  Both The Scarlet Letter and Tess of the D’Ubervilles are included in the 50.  I read them years apart, but my recollection is that Hardy is more heavy handed than Hawthorne.  Tess murders her seducer and is to be hanged.  Hester Prynne is merely shunned for refusing to name her seducer.

Put in more personal terms I continue to like The Scarlet Letter whereas while I admit that I was powerfully affected by Tess of the D’Urberilles I no longer like it; however, perhaps in this ongoing search Italo Calvino is useful: “In the 1980s, Italo Calvino said in his essay "Why Read the Classics?" that "a classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say" and comes to the crux of personal choice in this matter when he says: "Your classic author is the one you cannot feel indifferent to, who helps you define yourself in relation to him, even in dispute with him." Consideration of what makes a literary work a classic is for Calvino ultimately a personal choice, and, constructing a universal definition of what constitutes a Classic Book seems to him to be an impossibility, since, as Calvino says "There is nothing for it but for all of us to invent our own ideal libraries of classics.”   

Alas, even if I agree with Calvino, I won’t be inventing such a library.  I’ve read most of the novels on these various lists over a long period of time, and I am not willing to go back and reread novels I no longer like in order to reevaluate my feelings.       

Reading Franklin Library authors

 Since beginning a collection of Franklin Library leather-bound books, I’ve read three novels that are not now and may never in the future be considered “literary classics”: Graham Greene’s The Human Factor, Mickey Spillane’s The Killing Man, and Nelson Demille’s The General’s Daughter.  If I manage to read an entire novel, I have probably suspended disbelief for the most part while doing so.  But afterwards I ought to be willing to find words to describe whatever it is I do believe about a novel, taking into consideration that many novels I read long ago have not aged well when I recall them.  For example, I read Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, and thought them at the time  his best.  But now in retrospect they seem heavy-handed social criticism.  The Hardy novel chosen as a Franklin Library classic is The Return of the Native, and I do not (now) disagree.  I have reread that one a couple of times and may read it again. 

The three novels first mentioned are Franklin Library “signed first editions.”  Of the three, Spillane’s seems least likely to live long enough to every be considered a classic.  Spillane began his writing career by writing brief stories for comic books, and this novel seems rather like that.

Graham Greene’s The Human Factor is very well written and as long as Greene was being amusing, the novel was enjoyable, but after revealing that his main character, Castle, is a spy, he becomes less enjoyable.  Castle while stationed in South Africa fell in love with his confidential informant, who is black and not able to get a passport to travel to England.  The only person willing to help him is a Russian diplomat who later asks for seemingly harmless information from time to time.  When it becomes obvious to MI-5 that there is a leak, Castle’s partner who always seems to win at the race track, is thought the spy and poisoned by Castle’s boss.  Castle is outraged and eventually confesses in a round about way to show his boss that he killed the wrong person.  After that Castle is whisked off to Moscow where he is assigned drab living quarters and may not be able to have his wife and child join him for a number of years.  Greene was enjoyable while he was having his characters talk cleverly to each other, but he later became as drab as Castle’s Moscow living quarters.  The novel was written in 1978.  The Cold War ended in 1989.  I doubt that The Human Factor will ever be considered a Classic.

I enjoyed Nelson DeMille’s The General’s Daughter thoroughly, from beginning to end.  However, this novel is in the “detective-fiction” genre.  Will any novel written in this genre ever in the future be considered a “classic”?  I suppose it’s possible.  Hollywood considered this novel good enough to make a movie from it.  DeMille may have elevated this novel above most detective fiction by taking on the inequity of a woman (the general’s daughter) being gang-raped during West Point training and then having it covered up “for the good of the Army.”  Assuming these inequities will have been significantly reduced in the future, much as those Hardy railed against, will Demille’s novel still seem interesting to a first-time reader?  He, at least has an advantage (to Americans) that Hardy didn’t.  The detective in this genre is cleverly and amusingly sarcastic, and Demille’s Paul Brenner is very good at sarcasm.  Even so, when this genre dies, assuming that it one day will, will The General’s Daughter still be there, standing on its own merits, to be declared a classic?  Maybe. 

Patchett's The Magician's Assistant

 

The Magician's Assistant seems the most aesthetically satisfying of the Patchett novels I've read thus far.  It has a solid basis in Germanic mythology that remains consistent throughout, and the ending (unlike the other three novels I read) is clever and satisfying -- aesthetically. It is probably especially important to emphasize aesthetics in this novel because there is quite a lot to object to moralistically.

In Old and Middle English Literature from the Beginnings to 1485, George K. Anderson writes on page 39, "As would be expected of any Germanic literature, we find in Anglo-Saxon writings a remarkable predilection for moralizing.  English literature as a whole has been thoroughly impregnated with teaching and aphorism; indeed, English literary criticism has been prone to base judgments more on the sense of a literary work than on its aesthetics."  Patchett free-wheels in her novels, tip-toeing past a bit of teaching, but stuff that is tame for our times.  She is more comfortable with aesthetics.  In The Magician's Assistant, Parsifal is early in the novel seemingly sent off to a reformatory as a boy to cure him of his homosexuality.  Moralizing regarding that sort of thing would be very safe in these times, but as Sabine makes contact with Parsifal's mother and sisters, she learns that Guy/Parsifal wasn't sent to a reformatory for his homosexuality. He was sent there by his mother to prevent his being sent to prison for killing his father with a baseball bat.  The father was kicking the mother while she was on the floor and pregnant at the time.  Guy hit his father with a baseball bat and killed him.   Were boys really sent to prison for that sort of thing?

Susan was ever inclined to take the poor in spirit under her wing -- under our wings I should say because I went along with her.  One such person was Greg, 27 years old who went from church to church looking for one that truly practiced Christian charity.  Eventually he found Susan and we (not our church) took him in.  One cold night in our apartment after a few months, Greg confessed that when he was 17 he had killed his father for the very same reason that Parsifal killed his.  Greg though didn't get to go to a reformatory.  He was sent to prison for nearly ten years.   His story was a bit off-putting when he confided that he had begun to think of me as his father, but he intended that in a nice way.  Though laws, according to Patchett have softened in regard to a mother or one of her children killing an abusive husband or father, Patchett isn't entering into Thomas Hardy territory with the legal abuse of children who kill a parent in self-defense.  And, Sabine learns, Parsifal's mother and sisters adore him and have, ever since he left, wished he would return to them in Nebraska.  Parsifal because he has grown rich has been sending them money.  He still cares about them, Sabine learns, but his becoming a Californian is so thoroughgoing that he could never return to Nebraska.

After his death, his assistant through dreams and hallucinations is encouraged to go to Nebraska, and when she does she does all the wonderful things that Parsifal ought to have done as a loving son and brother, and perhaps would have if he wasn't rendered psychologically incapable of returning to Nebraska which for him would have been very like the occasion when he was locked by his father in a refrigerator.  Though he became a famous magician, he couldn't do any of Houdini's tricks.  He could not lock himself in an enclosed area and escape -- but his assistant could. 

It is nothing today to defend homosexuality.  So what if Parsifal was homosexual.  It isn't preaching to describe him in favorable terms, nor is it unusual to describe his relationship with Pham in gentler and ethereal terms.  It is perhaps strange to learn of the long term, but unconsummated, relationship between Parsifal and his assistant, Sabine.  She loves him as much as he loves her, but as to sex, he has Pham (who also loves Sabine in the same manner that Parsifal does).  Sabine has had some brief affairs over the years, but nothing very enjoyable or long-lasting.  The only satisfying relationships she has had have been with Parsifal and Pham -- very emotional and strong, but sexless. 

The reader has become used to Sabine's sexlessness, even though she is gorgeous and sought after throughout her life.  Then  back in Nebraska as she she becomes immersed in the lives of Parsifal's mother and sisters, she cares for his mother and becomes as well loved by her as his sisters.   The problem sister, Kitty, Parsifal's favorite, the one who looks like him, the one who was his assistant as he practiced his magic tricks as a child, has been incapable of choosing a decent husband.  The current one whom Sabine fends off is an abusive bully.  Kitty one evening, hiding out with Sabine from the husband, intends to kiss Sabine on the cheek goodnight, but she misses and they kiss on the lips -- an electric moment when they both realize something that doesn't need to be discussed or elaborated upon. 

And so at the end Sabine announces that she is taking Kitty and her two sons with her back to Los Angeles.  She is rich and has a huge house.  The mother and other sister can visit as often as they like.  The assistant as she has done throughout her career, has performed beautifully, perfectly, satisfyingly.  And so was the novel's ending -- aesthetically.